The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(37)
“No” was all that Molly could manage to say. The bell rang, and lunch was over.
—
Hurrying into the hallway, Molly ran into Beth Firestein.
“Are you all right?” Beth asked, lightly touching Molly’s arm. Beneath her manicured hand, Molly’s skin looked allergically splotchy and red. “You don’t look all right.”
Under the elder teacher’s cool, intelligent gaze, Molly could not lie and could not tell the truth. “My kids are waiting,” she said, and pulled away.
She went into the hall. Here the students were swarming. Their sounds were all around her, the squeaking of sneakers and the echoing clanging of lockers slammed shut. A hand-painted banner drooped overhead: FEAR, MADNESS, GREED—VALLEY DRAMA DEPARTMENT PRESENTS—TOM STOPPARD’S “DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.” And the world through which she moved seemed curiously loosened, unfastened—she grew dizzy in the crowd of faces, a stretch of mopped linoleum slippery beneath her feet, and she paused and pressed her palm against a locker to steady herself. Her heart went on hammering in her chest, a little wildly, and there was a trembling in her fingers and a lightness in her legs and a cold, dull weight at her core. The faces around her, baby-cheeked, pimple-spattered, belonged to kids she didn’t know. Her thought was a drumbeat:
Which one?
Which one?
The kids went into classrooms; the classroom doors shut. Each one she passed had a small window at eye level, and past these portholes floated other teachers’ disembodied heads. Molly’s afternoon class was gathered outside her door at the end of the hallway, waiting to be let in. They huddled in circles or sat on the floor with their backs against the wall. Seeing them, she felt her body jangling with nerves as it had not since her first day. She had the feeling of one waiting in the wings to start a play, having forgotten every line. At Doug’s door she paused, peered through the porthole. Gwen was right, he was gone: his students milled among the desks, a substitute teacher flailed for attention. Molly recalled how Doug had greeted his students in the doorway every day, how he’d patted their backs and reached for their hands. It had charmed her. Now his desk was deserted and bare.
For the rest of the afternoon, as her students buzzed around her, Molly scrutinized her relationship with Doug Ellison as if feeling for a slipped stitch. She remembered his novel, with its chauvinistic teacher and nubile student. It had disgusted her, but it was only a story, and to condemn a man based on fiction alone would be to betray her own principles. What about American Psycho? A Clockwork Orange? For God’s sake, Lolita?
And there was the day she’d reached out to Calista Broderick—how strangely Calista had acted, how damaged she’d seemed. Was it possible—of course it was possible—that Calista had been the one?
Soon another scene rose to Molly’s mind, one she’d previously tried to block out. Several weeks before, she and Doug had been finishing lunch when a few kids trickled into his classroom. The first among them was a tall, uncommonly beautiful girl, not her student, named Elisabeth Avarine. She’d settled in a back-row seat and stretched her arms over her head. She was somehow clumsy and graceful at once, like a colt staggering from the womb. Molly had openly stared; she just could not imagine how it felt to look like that. She’d turned to Doug and he was watching the girl too, curious and yet more than curious: hungry.
—
It was four o’clock when Molly got home, and the main house was undergoing its daily changing of the guard: the Range Rover in the driveway, the daytime nannies handing off to the evening staff, the children running inside to trade school clothes and backpacks for soccer shorts and flute cases. The nannies were hurrying the kids in Spanish, the kids responding in English and nonsense. The little one, Archer, stood on the front stoop in only his diaper, desperate not to put on his pants. “I don’t wanna go!” he was wailing. Then: “I don’t wanna stay!” Molly understood him. The world was such a wrong place—how could one go, how could one stay? She forced herself to smile and wave as she circled around to her studio, then let herself in and locked the door.
The sight of the bed was more than she could stand. She went to the bathroom and ran the shower, undressed quickly, puddling her clothes on the floor, and stepped under the water. She shivered. Hot water needled her shoulders and back. But she wanted to be scalded—the best part of sunburn was peeling.
Under the steaming water she tried to black out the images that came to her, of Doug and the girl—whoever it was. Calista? Elisabeth? Another student Molly didn’t know? How had he done it? Had he rented a room in some seedy hotel? Had he pulled her into the world of dusty ashtrays and sour sheets, cellophaned soap, hangers handcuffed to the rod? A Mill Valley girl would never have been in a place like that before. He would have opened her eyes to the unclean world, undone in one sordid night sixteen years of her parents’ careful tending.
Molly knew what girls needed: he had told the girl he loved her. She must have thought she loved him too.
She recalled how he’d twisted his hands in her hair, pressed her head toward the band of his boxers; how he’d stroked her neck while they kissed on her love seat; how he’d pulled her chair out in his classroom, its metal feet scraping the floor. Had he really thought he would get away with it? Cheating on his wife with Molly, with a sixteen-year-old child? Or—God—cheating on the child with her.